1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and system for multiple computer or process coordinating. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and system for network management.
2. Description of Related Art
Technology expenditures have become a significant portion of operating costs for most enterprises, and businesses are constantly seeking ways to reduce information technology (IT) costs. This has given rise to an increasing number of outsourcing service providers, each promising, often contractually, to deliver reliable service while offloading the costly burdens of staffing, procuring, and maintaining an IT organization. While most service providers started as network pipe providers, they are moving into server outsourcing, application hosting, and desktop management. For those enterprises that do not outsource, they are demanding more accountability from their IT organizations as well as demanding that IT is integrated into their business goals. In both cases, “service level agreements” have been employed to contractually guarantee service delivery between an IT organization and its customers. As a result, IT teams now require management solutions that focus on and support “business processes” and “service delivery” rather than just disk space monitoring and network pings.
IT solutions now require end-to-end management that includes network connectivity, server maintenance, and application management in order to succeed. The focus of IT organizations has turned to ensuring overall service delivery and not just the “towers” of network, server, desktop, and application. Management systems must fulfill two broad goals: a flexible approach that allows rapid deployment and configuration of new services for the customer; and an ability to support rapid delivery of the management tools themselves. A successful management solution fits into a heterogeneous environment, provides openness with which it can knit together management tools and other types of applications, and a consistent approach to managing all of the IT assets.
With all of these requirements, a successful management approach will also require attention to the needs of the staff within the IT organization to accomplish these goals: the ability of an IT team to deploy an appropriate set of management tasks to match the delegated responsibilities of the IT staff; the ability of an IT team to navigate the relationships and effects of all of their technology assets, including networks, middleware, and applications; the ability of an IT team to define their roles and responsibilities consistently and securely across the various management tasks; the ability of an IT team to define groups of customers and their services consistently across the various management tasks; and the ability of an IT team to address, partition, and reach consistently the managed devices.
Many service providers have stated the need to be able to scale their capabilities to manage millions of devices. When one considers the number of customers in a home consumer network as well as pervasive devices, such as smart mobile phones, these numbers are quickly realized. Significant bottlenecks appear when typical IT solutions attempt to support more than several thousand devices.
Given such network spaces, a management system must be very resistant to failure so that service attributes, such as response time, uptime, and throughput, are delivered in accordance with guarantees in a service level agreement. In addition, a service provider may attempt to support as many customers as possible within a single network management system. The service provider's profit margins may materialize from the ability to bill the usage of a common network management system to multiple customers.
On the other hand, the service provider must be able to support contractual agreements on an individual basis. Service attributes, such as response time, uptime, and throughput, must be determinable for each customer. In order to do so, a network management system must provide a suite of network management tools that is able to perform device monitoring and discovery for each customer's network while integrating these abilities across a shared network backbone to gather the network management information into the service provider's distributed data processing system. By providing network management for each customer within an integrated system, a robust management system can enable a service provider to enter into quality-of-service (QOS) agreements with customers.
Hence, there is a direct relationship between the ability of a management system to provide network monitoring and discovery functionality and the ability of a service provider using the management system to serve multiple customers using a single management system. Preferably, the management system can replicate services, detect faults within a service, restart services, and reassign work to a replicated service. By implementing a common set of interfaces across all of their services, each service developer gains the benefits of system robustness. A well-designed, component-oriented, highly distributed system can easily accept a variety of services on a common infrastructure with built-in fault-tolerance and levels of service.
Distributed data processing systems with thousands of nodes are known in the prior art. The nodes can be geographically dispersed, and the overall computing environment can be managed in a distributed manner. The managed environment can be logically separated into a series of loosely connected managed regions, each with its management server for managing local resources. The management servers coordinate activities across the enterprise and permit remote site management and operation. Local resources within one region can be exported for the use of other regions.
Meeting quality-of-service objectives in a highly distributed system can be quite difficult. However, within a system that performs network management tasks for a million devices or more, a tremendous amount of computational resources throughout the system could be consumed for the managerial functions. When management activities are performed at a particular machine, a measurable amount of bandwidth could be consumed. In general, a customer does not want to experience a reduction in system performance, such as slower communication speeds, when a system is busy performing system management activities. Typical solutions for maintaining the bandwidth of the overall distributed system include increasing hardware resources throughout the network. However, solving one performance problem may introduce another problem.
A service provider should attempt to minimize the reduction of bandwidth that is caused by any system management activities. One manner of increasing bandwidth performance related to network management activities is to reduce the bandwidth requirements of the network management activities, although this technique cannot necessarily be applied without regard to the operation of other components within the machine. For example, a particular device may support a set of multiple protocols, and more than one protocol may provide certain functionality required by a particular component on the device to accomplish a particular network management task. However, each protocol may perform certain functions with less network traffic than other protocols, and bandwidth requirements for the device could be reduced by choosing the most appropriate protocol for the task from among the set of supported protocols.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standard protocol that is used to administer management tasks on many currently available devices. SNMP can be difficult to integrate with other protocols, especially proprietary protocols. Current application frameworks, however, do not provide a platform-independent interface for certain network management processes, such as scanning protocols or discovery methods.
Therefore, it would be particularly advantageous to provide a method and system that provides a flexible, platform-independent scheme for network management tasks in a highly distributed system. It would be particularly advantageous for the network management system to provide a methodology for monitoring the status of endpoints using a variety of protocols.